As Night Closes In

I was saddened to learn a few days ago, via a phone call
from a fellow author, that William R. Catton Jr. died early last month, just
short of his 89th birthday. Some of my readers will have no idea who he was;
others may dimly recall that I’ve mentioned him and his most important book, Overshoot,
repeatedly in these essays. Those who’ve taken the time to read the book just
named may be wondering why none of the sites in the peak oil blogosphere has
put up an obituary, or even noted the man’s passing. I don’t happen to know the
answer to that last question, though I have my suspicions.

I encountered Overshoot for the first time in a
college bookstore in Bellingham, Washington in 1983. Red letters on a stark
yellow spine spelled out the title, a word I already knew from my classes in
ecology and systems theory; I pulled it off the shelf, and found the future
staring me in the face. This is what’s on the front cover below the title:

carrying capacity: maximum
permanently supportable load.

cornucopian myth: euphoric
belief in limitless resources.

drawdown: stealing
resources from the future.

cargoism:
delusion that technology will always save us from

overshoot:growth beyond
an area’s carrying capacity, leading to

crash: die-off.

If you want to know where I got the core ideas I’ve been
exploring in these essays for the last eight-going-on-nine years, in other
words, now you know. I still have that copy of Overshoot; it’s sitting
on the desk in front of me right now, reminding me yet again just how many
chances we had to turn away from the bleak future that’s closing in around us
now, like the night at the end of a long day.

Plenty of books in the 1970s and early 1980s applied the
lessons of ecology to the future of industrial civilization and picked up at
least part of the bad news that results. Overshoot was arguably the best
of the lot, but it was pretty much guaranteed to land even deeper in the memory
hole than the others. The difficulty was that Catton’s book didn’t pander to
the standard mythologies that still beset any attempt to make sense of the
predicament we’ve made for ourselves; it provided no encouragement to what he
called cargoism, the claim that technological progress will inevitably allow us
to have our planet and eat it too, without falling off the other side of the
balance into the sort of apocalyptic daydreams that Hollywood loves to make
into bad movies. Instead, in calm, crisp, thoughtful prose, he explained how
industrial civilization was cutting its own throat, how far past the point of
no return we’d already gone, and what had to be done in order to salvage
anything from the approaching wreck.

As I noted in
a post here in 2011, I had the chance to meet Catton at an ASPO
conference, and tried to give him some idea of how much his book had meant to
me. I did my best not to act like a fourteen-year-old fan meeting a rock star,
but I’m by no means sure that I succeeded. We talked for fifteen minutes over
dinner; he was very gracious; then things moved on, each of us left the
conference to carry on with our lives, and now he’s gone. As the old song says,
that’s the way it goes.

There’s much more that could be said about William Catton,
but that task should probably be left for someone who knew the man as a
teacher, a scholar, and a human being. I didn’t; except for that one
fifteen-minute conversation, I knew him solely as the mind behind one of the
books that helped me make sense of the world, and then kept me going on the
long desert journey through the Reagan era, when most of those who claimed to
be environmentalists over the previous decade cashed in their ideals and waved
around the cornucopian myth as their excuse for that act. Thus I’m simply going
to urge all of my readers who haven’t yet read Overshoot to do so as
soon as possible, even if they have to crawl on their bare hands and knees over
abandoned fracking equipment to get a copy. Having said that, I’d like to go on
to the sort of tribute I think he would have appreciated most: an attempt to
take certain of his ideas a little further than he did.

The core of Overshoot, which is also the core of the
entire world of appropriate technology and green alternatives that got shot
through the head and shoved into an unmarked grave in the Reagan years, is the
recognition that the principles of ecology apply to industrial society just as
much as they do to other communities of living things. It’s odd, all things
considered, that this is such a controversial proposal. Most of us have no
trouble grasping the fact that the law of gravity affects human beings the same
way it affects rocks; most of us understand that other laws of nature really do
apply to us; but quite a few of us seem to be incapable of extending that same
sensible reasoning to one particular set of laws, the ones that govern how
communities of living things relate to their environments.

If people treated gravity the way they treat ecology, you
could visit a news website any day of the week and read someone insisting with
a straight face that while it’s true that rocks fall down when dropped, human
beings don’t—no, no, they fall straight up into the sky, and anyone who thinks
otherwise is so obviously wrong that there’s no point even discussing the
matter. That degree of absurdity appears every single day in the American
media, and in ordinary conversations as well, whenever ecological issues come
up. Suggest that a finite planet must by definition contain a finite amount of
fossil fuels, that dumping billions of tons of gaseous trash into the air every
single year for centuries might change the way that the atmosphere retains
heat, or that the law of diminishing returns might apply to technology the way
it applies to everything else, and you can pretty much count on being shouted
down by those who, for all practical purposes, might as well believe that the
world is flat.

Still, as part of the ongoing voyage into the unspeakable in
which this blog is currently engaged, I’d like to propose that, in fact, human
societies are as subject to the laws of ecology as they are to every other
dimension of natural law. That act of intellectual heresy implies certain
conclusions that are acutely unwelcome in most circles just now; still, as my regular
readers will have noticed long since, that’s just one of the services this blog
offers.

Let’s start with the basics. Every ecosystem, in
thermodynamic terms, is a process by which relatively concentrated energy is
dispersed into diffuse background heat. Here on Earth, at least, the
concentrated energy mostly comes from the Sun, in the form of solar
radiation—there are a few ecosystems, in deep oceans and underground, that get
their energy from chemical reactions driven by the Earth’s internal heat instead.
Ilya Prigogine showed some decades back that the flow of energy through a
system of this sort tends to increase the complexity of the system; Jeremy
England, a MIT physicist, has recently shown that the same process accounts
neatly for the origin of life itself. The steady flow of energy from source to
sink is the foundation on which everything else rests.

The complexity of the system, in turn, is limited by the
rate at which energy flows through the system, and this in turn depends on the
difference in concentration between the energy that enters the system, on the
one hand, and the background into which waste heat diffuses when it leaves the
system, on the other. That shouldn’t be a difficult concept to grasp. Not only
is it basic thermodynamics, it’s basic physics—it’s precisely equivalent, in
fact, to pointing out that the rate at which water flows through any section of
a stream depends on the difference in height between the place where the water
flows into that section and the place where it flows out.

Simple as it is, it’s a point that an astonishing number of
people—including some who are scientifically literate—routinely miss. A
while back on this blog, for example, I noted that one of the core
reasons you can’t power a modern industrial civilization on solar energy is
that sunlight is relatively diffuse as an energy source, compared to the
extremely concentrated energy we get from fossil fuels. I still field rants
from people insisting that this is utter hogwash, since photons have exactly
the same amount of energy they did when they left the Sun, and so the energy
they carry is just as concentrated as it was when it left the Sun. You’ll
notice, though, that if this was the only variable that mattered, Neptune would
be just as warm as Mercury, since each of the photons hitting the one planet
pack on average the same energetic punch as those that hit the other.

It’s hard to think of a better example of the blindness to
whole systems that’s pandemic in today’s geek culture. Obviously, the
difference between the temperatures of Neptune and Mercury isn’t a function of
the energy of individual photons hitting the two worlds; it’s a function of
differing concentrations of photons—the number of them, let’s say, hitting a
square meter of each planet’s surface. This is also one of the two figures that
matter when we’re talking about solar energy here on Earth. The other? That’s
the background heat into which waste energy disperses when the system, eco- or
solar, is done with it. On the broadest scale, that’s deep space, but
ecosystems don’t funnel their waste heat straight into orbit, you know. Rather,
they diffuse it into the ambient temperature at whatever height above or below
sea level, and whatever latitude closer or further from the equator, they
happen to be—and since that’s heated by the Sun, too, the difference between
input and output concentrations isn’t very substantial.

Nature has done astonishing things with that very modest
difference in concentration. People who insist that photosynthesis is horribly
inefficient, and of course we can improve its efficiency, are missing a crucial
point: something like half the energy that reaches the leaves of a green plant
from the Sun is put to work lifting water up from the roots by an ingenious
form of evaporative pumping, in which water sucked out through the leaf pores
as vapor draws up more water through a network of tiny tubes in the plant’s
stems. Another few per cent goes into the manufacture of sugars by
photosynthesis, and a variety of minor processes, such as the chemical
reactions that ripen fruit, also depend to some extent on light or heat from
the Sun; all told, a green plant is probably about as efficient in its total
use of solar energy as the laws of thermodynamics will permit.

What’s more, the Earth’s ecosystems take the energy that
flows through the green engines of plant life and put it to work in an
extraordinary diversity of ways. The water pumped into the sky by what
botanists call evapotranspiration—that’s the evaporative pumping I mentioned a
moment ago—plays critical roles in local, regional, and global water cycles.
The production of sugars to store solar energy in chemical form kicks off an
even more intricate set of changes, as the plant’s cells are eaten by
something, which is eaten by something, and so on through the lively but
precise dance of the food web. Eventually all the energy the original plant
scooped up from the Sun turns into diffuse waste heat and permeates slowly up
through the atmosphere to its ultimate destiny warming some corner of deep
space a bit above absolute zero, but by the time it gets there, it’s usually
had quite a ride.

That said, there are hard upper limits to the complexity of
the ecosystem that these intricate processes can support. You can see that
clearly enough by comparing a tropical rain forest to a polar tundra. The two
environments may have approximately equal amounts of precipitation over the course
of a year; they may have an equally rich or poor supply of nutrients in the
soil; even so, the tropical rain forest can easily support fifteen or twenty
thousand species of plants and animals, and the tundra will be lucky to support
a few hundred. Why? The same reason Mercury is warmer than Neptune: the rate at
which photons from the sun arrive in each place per square meter of surface.

Near the equator, the sun’s rays fall almost
vertically.Close to the poles, since
the Earth is round, the Sun’s rays come in at a sharp angle, and thus are
spread out over more surface area. The ambient temperature’s quite a bit warmer
in the rain forest than it is on the tundra, but because the vast heat engine
we call the atmosphere pumps heat from the equator to the poles, the difference
in ambient temperature is not as great as the difference in solar input per
cubic meter. Thus ecosystems near the equator have a greater difference in
energy concentration between input and output than those near the poles, and the
complexity of the two systems varies accordingly.

All this should be common knowledge. Of course it isn’t,
because the industrial world’s notions of education consistently ignore what
William Catton called “the processes that matter”—that is, the fundamental laws
of ecology that frame our existence on this planet—and approach a great many of
those subjects that do make it into the curriculum in ways that encourage the
most embarrassing sort of ignorance about the natural processes that keep us
all alive. Down the road a bit, we’ll be discussing that in much more detail.
For now, though, I want to take the points just made and apply them
systematically, in much the way Catton did, to the predicament of industrial
civilization.

A human society is an ecosystem.Like any other ecosystem, it depends for its
existence on flows of energy, and as with any other ecosystem, the upper limit
on its complexity depends ultimately on the difference in concentration between
the energy that enters it and the background into which its waste heat
disperses. (This last point is a corollary of White’s Law, one of the
fundamental principles of human ecology, which holds that a society’s economic
development is directly proportional to its consumption of energy per capita.)Until the beginning of the industrial
revolution, that upper limit was not much higher than the upper limit of
complexity in other ecosystems, since human ecosystems drew most of their
energy from the same source as nonhuman ones: sunlight falling on green plants.As human societies figured out how to tap
other flows of solar energy—windpower to drive windmills and send ships
coursing over the seas, water power to turn mills, and so on—that upper limit
crept higher, but not dramatically so.

The discoveries that made it possible to turn fossil fuels
into mechanical energy transformed that equation completely. The geological
processes that stockpiled half a billion years of sunlight into coal, oil, and
natural gas boosted the concentration of the energy inputs available to
industrial societies by an almost unimaginable factor, without warming the
ambient temperature of the planet more than a few degrees, and the huge
differentials in energy concentration that resulted drove an equally
unimaginable increase in complexity. Choose any measure of complexity you
wish—number of discrete occupational categories, average number of human beings
involved in the production, distribution, and consumption of any given good or
service, or what have you—and in the wake of the industrial revolution, it
soared right off the charts. Thermodynamically, that’s exactly what you’d
expect.

The difference in energy concentration between input and
output, it bears repeating, defines the upper limit of complexity. Other
variables determine whether or not the system in question will achieve that
upper limit. In the ecosystems we call human societies, knowledge is one of
those other variables. If you have a highly concentrated energy source and
don’t yet know how to use it efficiently, your society isn’t going to become as
complex as it otherwise could. Over the three centuries of industrialization,
as a result, the production of useful knowledge was a winning strategy, since
it allowed industrial societies to rise steadily toward the upper limit of
complexity defined by the concentration differential. The limit was never
reached—the law of diminishing returns saw to that—and so, inevitably,
industrial societies ended up believing that knowledge all by itself was
capable of increasing the complexity of the human ecosystem. Since there’s no
upper limit to knowledge, in turn, that belief system drove what Catton called
the cornucopian myth, the delusion that there would always be enough resources
if only the stock of knowledge increased quickly enough.

That belief only seemed to work, though, as long as the
concentration differential between energy inputs and the background remained
very high. Once easily accessible fossil fuels started to become scarce, and
more and more energy and other resources had to be invested in the extraction
of what remained, problems started to crop up. Tar sands and oil shales in
their natural form are not as concentrated an energy source as light sweet
crude—once they’re refined, sure, the differences are minimal, but a whole
system analysis of energy concentration has to start at the moment each energy
source enters the system. Take a cubic yard of tar sand fresh from the pit
mine, with the sand still in it, or a cubic yard of oil shale with the oil
still trapped in the rock, and you’ve simply got less energy per unit volume
than you do if you’ve got a cubic yard of light sweet crude fresh from the
well, or even a cubic yard of good permeable sandstone with light sweet crude
oozing out of every pore.

It’s an article of faith in contemporary culture that such
differences don’t matter, but that’s just another aspect of our cornucopian
myth. The energy needed to get the sand out of the tar sands or the oil out of
the shale oil has to come from somewhere, and that energy, in turn, is not
available for other uses. The result, however you slice it conceptually, is
that the upper limit of complexity begins moving down. That sounds abstract,
but it adds up to a great deal of very concrete misery, because as already noted,
the complexity of a society determines such things as the number of different
occupational specialties it can support, the number of employees who are
involved in the production and distribution of a given good or service, and so
on. There’s a useful phrase for a sustained contraction in the usual measures
of complexity in a human ecosystem: “economic depression.”

The economic troubles that are shaking the industrial world
more and more often these days, in other words, are symptoms of a disastrous
mismatch between the level of complexity that our remaining concentration
differential can support, and the level of complexity that our preferred
ideologies insist we ought to have. As those two things collide, there’s no
question which of them is going to win. Adding to our total stock of knowledge
won’t change that result, since knowledge is a necessary condition for economic
expansion but not a sufficient one: if the upper limit of complexity set by the
laws of thermodynamics drops below the level that your knowledge base would
otherwise support, further additions to the knowledge base simply mean that
there will be a growing number of things that people know how to do in theory,
but that nobody has the resources to do in practice.

Knowledge, in other words, is not a magic wand, a surrogate
messiah, or a source of miracles. It can open the way to exploiting energy more
efficiently than otherwise, and it can figure out how to use energy resources
that were not previously being used at all, but it can’t conjure energy out of
thin air. Even if the energy resources are there, for that matter, if other
factors prevent them from being used, the knowledge of how they might be used
offers no consolation—quite the contrary.

That latter point, I think, sums up the tragedy of William Catton’s career. He knew, and could explain with great clarity, why industrialism would bring about its own downfall, and what could be done to salvage something from its wreck. That knowledge, however, was not enough to make things happen; only a few people ever listened, most of them promptly plugged their ears and started chanting “La, la, la, I can’t hear you” once Reagan made that fashionable, and the actions that might have spared all of us a vast amount of misery never happened. When I spoke to him in 2011, he was perfectly aware that his life’s work had done essentially nothing to turn industrial society aside from its rush toward the abyss. That’s got to be a bitter thing to contemplate in your final hours, and I hope his thoughts were on something else last month as the night closed in at last.